Lindsay Kirker, Artist – Okanagan
Lindsay Kirker creates largescale oil paintings that examine our relationship with Nature through the built environment. She is drawn to line, grid, and repetition as modes of communication and the construction site as a metaphor for rebuilding. She graduated from the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus in 2020 with her MFA in Visual Arts. Her solo exhibition This is a Love Story is on display at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art until December 18.
- Tracey Emin and artist talks over Zoom
Yesterday I listened to Emin speak about her exhibition with Edvard Munch at Oslo’s Munch Museum called The Loneliness of the Soul. It is Emin’s relationship with her practice and the way she speaks about painting that I am drawn to. She explains that she is not looking to paint something she already knows; instead, the painting is going to teach her something that she needs to know. It is a very intuitive process.
One of my favourite books, The Humans, is written by Haig. I am currently reading The Midnight Library, where a woman gets the opportunity to live an infinite amount of lives based on the things she wished she had done differently. Haig’s books are filled with larger antidotes and beautiful life lessons, and I feel I am always reading them at the exact moment I need to.
- Coffee
It gets me out of bed. I live for the morning: I can think, write, paint. I’m at the top of my game, but all that is thanks to coffee! I love coffee.
- Teresa Coady and conscious construction
I asked Coady to write the essay that runs parallel to my current exhibition. She is a powerhouse of a woman, an award-winning architect, former president and CEO of two of Canada’s largest design firms, and a member of the United Nations Environment Programme Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction. In 2020, she wrote Rebuilding Earth: Designing Ecoconscious Habitats for Humans. In this book she unpacks everything from concrete to HVAC to the glue being used in glue-laminated beams. It is an in-depth look that reflects decades of experience and research, and examines how we can build in better relation to the health of the Earth and ourselves.
- Objects being lifted by cranes
This picture is the construction site near my house that has informed all but one painting in my show. In the early days of the pandemic, when everything was shut down, no cars drove by, and the city was quiet, I would walk down the street and still hear hammers, drills, and men talking. It was reassuring because I remember thinking at the time, “If the world was ending, surely they wouldn’t keep building a parkade and more office space.”